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Reade Fahs 
LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga.—An industry first occurred at the annual Vision Council meeting of optical senior executives in Florida this past January.

Under the leadership of Mike Hundert (CEO and founder of REM Eyewear) the Vision Council held a panel discussion that featured major optical philanthropic initiatives occurring throughout the world.

This was the first time that a broad cross-section of the business side of the optical industry focused so directly on various optical charities that have sprung up to serve broad underserved portions of the world’s population.

• Mark Sachs (product manager, vision and life at Blue Shield of CA) discussed the charity he founded— RestoringVision.org—which provides new readers and sunglasses to American Mission groups for free distribution to the developing world.

• Dr Jordan Kasslow (partner in an Upper East Side of Manhattan optometric practice called) discussed the not-for-profit he founded— Vision Spring which uses a micro-lending model involving poor people selling new readers out of a back-pack to other poor people in the developing world (thus providing both jobs and vision concurrently).

• Steve Schock, OD spoke about Optometry Giving Sight and their role in educating future optometric professionals and building clinics as part of longer term infrastructure development in the developing world.

• Marty Basset, CEO of Walman Optical, spoke about the cultural enrichment and vitality that has developed in his company from both their optical philanthropies in America and abroad but also through the development of a process to support the charitable programs that matter most to individual Walman associates.

• We also spoke about the work that our company, National Vision, Inc. has done both in support of RestoringVision.org, Vision Spring, and Optometry Giving Sight but also about National Vision’s own pilot programs in Peru and Mexico for building infrastructure to support exams and new glasses for the poor in those countries.

 
Click the image above to access the PowerPoint about social
responsibility delivered by National Vision’s Reade Fahs.
The panel discussions and the less formal talks that took place for several hours afterwards, may have struck a chord with the many conference participant—perhaps even to the point of opening a new chapter in the philanthropic endeavors of the various businesses represented at the conference.

It was generally agreed that we in the optical community are uniquely situated in our professional lives to go well beyond the traditional role of a business in society.

Our “product”, be it exams or eyewear, is vital to both economic productivity and the enjoyment of beauty.

Our “expertise”, be it vision assessment, manufacturing, design, supply chain and inventory management, is well suited to solving the logistical challenges associated with providing eye care and eyewear to the world’s underserved.

Our “ethic”, be it the work ethic associated with a demanding and competitive profession or the empathy and Hippocratic responsibilities we shoulder as providers of a medical servic—attract the sort of people with the “heart”, motivation, and desire to “serve the underserved.”

And the number of people whose vision needs are underserved is staggeringly large.

• Over 45 million people in the world are blin—a figure that is expected to grow to 76 million by 2020. Of these, 80 percent of the blindness could have been avoided by either early detection or treatment.

• 124 million people worldwide suffer from low vision.

• 670 million people in the world (almost 10 percent of the world’s population) suffer from uncorrected vision problem—most of which could be addressed by a normal pair of eyeglasses.
 

The recent Vision Council Executive Summit highlighted the
theme of “social purpose” with a special session. From left:
VC Program Chair, REM Eyewear’s Mike Hundert; Optometry
Giving Sight’s Steve Schock, OD; Vision Spring’s Jordan
Kassalow, OD, National Vision’s Reade Fahs; Restoring Vision’s
Mark Sachs, and Walman Optical’s Marty Bassett.
  


Certainly the optical community is more and more stepping up to its responsibilities and is addressing these issues in a variety of admirable ways and through a variety of organizations.

To assist the many groups working to improve vision in America and abroad, the two of us set off a few months ago to attempt to catalogue all the different philanthropic groups working in this area.

Vision Monday and Jobson has from the inception of the idea, encouraged and incubated this effort and has generously agreed to provide space in print as well as on their Web site (see A Greater Vision) for profiles and news updates about each philanthropy and their mission details as well as to provide a resource library.

It is our hope that the dissemination of information about the myriad organizations devoted to vision issues will encourage others in the optical community to get involved and will help the many organizations to better achieve their lofty sight-related goals.

While we in the optical community should take pride in the many efforts that are in place and developing today—with global vision needs that are so vast—we cannot shrink from our collective responsibilities to continue to expand and apply our unique specialized skills to the development of broad-scale durable scalable solutions to this enormous global public healthcare issue.

—Reade Fahs and Janet Callif


Reade Fahs is president and CEO of National Vision, Inc.
Janet Callif is a former optical retail executive and a consultant to National Vision.